No American armed service has seen more change in its roles than the Marine Corps. When it was founded, its men were soldiers who fought at sea, going aboard almost every American warship. Today, they are soldiers who fight primarily on land, carried across the sea by specialized amphibious ships, and it has been over 20 years since the last Marines came ashore from detached service aboard America's conventional warships, ending the mission that was ultimately the root of the modern concept of the Marine.

Royal Marines go ashore in boats

Soldiers had been going to sea since Antiquity to fight land battles aboard ship. At various points, this had been the main weapon available to warships. For instance, a third of the complement of the ships of the Spanish Armada were Marines, but from that point the the rising importance of naval guns saw this role decrease in importance, while the skills of sailing a ship grew more valuable. But that didn't foreclose the utility of a body of trained troops aboard ships, a practice the British regularized with the founding of the Royal Marines, who specialized in the job, in 1664. They would find their niche in two new roles. First, they were useful for the raids and small amphibious operations that warships were often called upon to perform, being trained as soldiers and also more familiar with the sea than the typical soldier. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they were under similar discipline to the Army and could be trusted to remain loyal to their officers, even if the sailors began to mutiny. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

I had a great time last weekend at Miramar, and expect to get photos up over the next few weeks. As a down-payment, have the last two currently on my cell phone:

I have learned a valuable lesson about the amount of sunscreen necessary for Miramar

On the way out, my plane flew over the Port, giving me one last look at my favorite place

2018 overhauls are Secondary Armament Parts one, two and three, my reviews of Mystic Seaport and Albacore and Battlecruisers Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Fouling, Naval Ranks - Warrant and Enlisted, Four Years Ago, Riverine Warfare - China Part 1, the McKinley Climatic Laboratory and HMS Warrior. 2020 overhauls are the Arleigh Burke Class, Territorial and International Waters, Falklands Part 24 and Pictures - Iowa Aft Living Spaces. 2021 overhauls are Liberty Ships Parts two, three and four and Pictures - Iowa Main Battery Plot.

The United States Coast Guard is unique among the country's six armed services.¹ Unlike the other services, it is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and its missions range from maritime law enforcement to search and rescue to port security to setting and enforcing regulations on ships to environmental protection and even maintenance of navigation aids. All of this requires what is usually credited as being the world's 12th-largest navy,² with 40,000 military and 10,000 civilian personnel, 259 cutters,³ 200 aircraft of various types and 1,600 boats.

The Coast Guard's origins go back to 1790, when Alexander Hamilton established the Revenue Marine to clamp down on smuggling, raising the tariff revenue that would support the new government. At the time, it was the only armed maritime force available to the United States, as the Navy had been disbanded and wouldn't be reestablished until 1798. The Revenue cutters were placed under Naval command during the War of 1812, as they have been in every American war since then, serving with distinction. The 19th century saw them fight pirates in the Gulf of Mexico, interdict the illegal slave trade and serve with the Union in the Civil War. It also saw the formation of a second organization, the United States Life-Saving Service, tasked with rescuing mariners in distress along the coasts. In 1915, the two organizations were merged to form the United States Coast Guard. Read more...

Reader Evan Þ recently visited the destroyer Turner Joy, and has agreed to contribute a review.⁴

Several weeks ago, a few friends and I went to see the USS Turner Joy, a destroyer museum ship in Bremerton, WA, right next to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

The Turner Joy is billed as the ship that fired both the first and last shots of the Vietnam War - she was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and she was doing fire support off the DMZ up until the moment the armistice went into effect. The ship is set up as she was in the Vietnam era, complete with the Orders of the Day posted for the trip back across the Pacific after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and also complete with an ominous warning on the bridge of what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.

Reminder that Miramar is next weekend, and there's still time to join us there. Also, will everyone who is planning to meet up send me an email so I can coordinate better day of.

2018 overhauls are my reviews of Salem and Nautilus, SYWTBAMN - Strategy Part 3, Falklands Part 6, Nimrod and Auxiliaries Part 3. 2019 overhauls are Riverine Warfare Africa and South America, my pictures from the Tinker Airshow, Falklands Part 18, Fire Control Transmission and Naval Ranks - Officers. 2020 overhauls are Operation K, ICNW Part 5, Missile Defense Through the Decades - A Worked Example and Falklands Part 23. 2021 overhauls are Liberty Ships Part 1, Standard Parts one and two and Missile Defense Tests Part 2.

I've recently been thinking deeply about the question of dual-purpose secondary batteries in the treaty era. Until recently, I've basically bought the line that DP is the obvious solution thanks to superior weight efficiency and the fact that you can build one gun which fills both roles. But further research has left me unsure of this, at least for most countries.

Vittorio Veneto displays portions of her secondary battery

The logic that Japan, Germany and Italy used in selecting their secondary batteries was all fairly similar. Basically, they thought that they needed a 6" weapon firing ~100 lb shells to be able to effectively counter destroyers. France also bought this logic on the Richelieu, although they chose to make those guns DP. They then discovered the problem with this, that a 6" shell is far too heavy to load rapidly, particularly at high angles, and were forced to join everyone else in fitting their ships with dedicated AA guns of around 4", which seems to have been the ideal AA caliber early in the war, with only the US not making use of it. Read more...

Despite the rather tortuous process that led to its authorization, the travails of the Trident I missile continued as the detailed specifications were worked out. The design brief was essentially to maintain the capability of Poseidon in a missile of the same size, but with twice the range to counter potential advances in Soviet ASW. This would require substantial changes in both the design of the missile and the guidance system, changes which proponents of hard-target capability would use to launch an attack on the Air Force's monopoly on the counterforce role.

A Trident C4 demonstrates its aerospike

Getting a range of 4,000 nm out of a missile that had to fit in the same tubes as Poseidon required extensive technical development. A third stage would be needed, and to keep length down, the designers wrapped the bus and warheads around it. This posed a serious problem when it came time to shut down the third stage. The normal strategy of venting the motor would impose unacceptable shocks on the bus, while flying the motor out the front would bathe it in rocket exhaust. An ingenious solution was found that removed the need for thrust termination. The guidance system was programmed to fly the missile on a trajectory that would use up all of the fuel in the third stage. The motor would then be ejected at 1 G, which allowed the ejection system to be tested on the ground instead of in flight, and the bus could begin releasing its warheads. The third stage required an extremely blunt nose, which would normally have increased drag when low in the atmosphere, and the designers came up with another solution, the aerospike. This was a rod that protruded from the nose on launch, and essentially tricked the air into acting like the nose was much longer than it was, giving an extra 300 miles of range. Read more...

It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

A couple of interesting things lately. For anyone who owns the game Stormworks, there's a recent full-scale Iowa that is just gorgeous. It's not completely perfect, but there are a lot of truly wonderful details. I used it to give the friends I play with a tour yesterday, and we all had a great time.

Second, I wrote up an entry criticizing some of the details on the EA evaluation of nuclear war.

2018 overhauls are my reviews of Constitution and Battleship Cove, The Battleship of the Future?, Underwater Protection Part 2, Understanding Hull Symbols and Lunshunkou and Weihaiwei. 2019 overhauls are Falklands Part 17, Pictures - Iowa Medical, A Brief Overview of the United States Fleet, Cool Facilities - David Taylor Model Basin, Riverine Warfare - North America and Spanish-American War Part 9. 2020 overhauls are Powder Part 4, Merchant Ships Tugs and Offshore Support and Falklands Part 22. 2021 overhauls are Lasers at Sea Part 3, Naval Radar - More Advanced Stuff and Norway Parts five and six.

Methods of gathering intelligence can be broadly divided into two categories: those where the target knows that you're watching, and those where he doesn't. Most modern methods of intelligence-gathering, such as satellites, airplanes and the internet, fall into the former category, and have the advantage that they're generally pretty effective and straightforward to implement. But they have one big downside. Because they know they're being watched, the enemy will try to control what you see. They can't do this perfectly, which leaves those as useful sources of information, but there are some things where you really want to know what the other side is doing when they don't think you're looking.

Human spies are of course the best-known example of this, but there is another, which has been almost as important over the last three-quarters of a century: the submarine. From the earliest days of the Cold War, NATO used these stealthy platforms to gather information the Soviet Union would rather it not have, doing everything from listening to communications off Russian bases to shadowing missile submarines and learning their patrol routines, plucking pieces of missile off the seabed and even tapping cables inside Soviet territorial waters.⁵ The ability of a mobile platform to get in close while undetected and then leave again proved vital to victory in the Cold War, and these missions, shrouded in secrecy, continue to this day. Read more...

There has been a great deal of discussion about classified information in the US lately, and it seemed worth taking some time to explain the system to those who don't normally have much cause to deal with it.⁶ I occasionally do, although not on a particularly high level, and most of what follows is based on research, not personal experience.

The US has two parallel systems for defense information that the government would like to keep secret. For nuclear matters, mostly relating to the design and production of nuclear weapons, the system is based on the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and run by the Department of Energy. Everything else uses a common set of clearances, governed not by law but by a series of Executive Orders dating back to the 1950s, the current authority being EO 13526, issued in 2009. We'll primarily focus on this system, as it covers the vast majority of classified documents. Read more...